


Little Church Mouse

by hearteating



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character of Faith, Exorcisms, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 13:00:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21635500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearteating/pseuds/hearteating
Summary: Mouse doesn't take her vows. She becomes an exorcist.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Little Church Mouse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mazily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazily/gifts).

> I've been wanting to write something focused on Mouse for ages, so I was so happy to get this assignment. Happy Yuletide!

Sometimes she thought her life would be better if she had never met him.

Father Marcus, beloved of God, who had never lost a soul. Protector of innocents and slayer of demons. God loved all His children, Mouse knew, and she also knew that He loved Marcus just that little bit more.

A man like that, how could she not want to be near him, to be like him? How could she not love him too?

The rest of the time, she knows better. She'd thought at the start that a convent would be good for her, a quiet life for the girl quiet as a church mouse. But she is too restless to have truly been happy. If it hadn't been Marcus, it would have been something else. She was unfit to be a nun even before her soul was tainted. 

Despite what some might think, it isn't Father Marcus' arrival that makes Mouse interested in exorcisms. When she was a child, she'd had a neighbor, and old man who liked to tell jokes and give out sweeties and sing at night, and all the children adored him. They loved his wife, too, who would scold them for eating her strawberries ever summer while she brought them bowls and cream. Then she had passed, and the man became...odd. It was grief, everyone said, but Mouse knew it was something else. He wasn't right. Then there had been the Incident. None of the adults would talk to the children about it, but it wasn't hard to put together the mutterings of "broken glass" with Matthew's absence from school. The man's son came back from London after that, with a new priest, and once again no one would say anything, but Mouse was quiet, and a good listener, and she soon found out the new priest was an exorcist. Weeks went by, and one day she saw the man out in his garden. He smiled at her and patted his pockets, before a look of shame crossed his face. He hurried inside, and she knew he was better. That the exorcist had made him better. What she didn't know was how it had been done. She wanted to find out.

With her first, failed exorcism, Mouse had revealed she couldn't be the exorcist Father Marcus was. Fine. Maybe it wouldn't come to her as easily as it had come to him, but she would never leave an exorcism unfinished. She would never betray anyone like that.

“Know your place,” Father Roberts had told her. She hadn't known her place, before; she'd hoped it was in the abbey. She knows it now. She has a duty to help the poor souls trapped by demons; she has a duty to help those suffering as she had suffered.

There is power in ritual, in repetition, in faith. Mouse isn't blind to the Church's many failings, but she can't help but believe. How can she not, after what she'd been through?

For a time, she sits in the back of churches and listens to mass. She doesn't partake in communion; she doesn't feel worthy.

And then, one day, she does, and her mouth doesn't burn and instead she feels more at peace than she has in a while. The demon is gone, even if the memory remains. 

It's in a church that she begins her new life as an exorcist. 

“Did you see?” one woman says to another as they walk past her. “Cathy didn't go up for communion again. Third week in a row.”

“Well, I wouldn't either,” the other woman replies, in the same gleeful gossipy tone. “If I'd missed out on my own granddaughter's christening. Sick, she said, like Matthew last spring didn't show up to his godson's christening half dead.”

Mouse sits up a little straighter. Could be nothing. Might be something.

“And Theresa told me,” the first woman continues, dropping her voice, “that her Kevin has heard strange noises coming from Cathy's place. Says they don't sound _human_.”

There is a moment of silence as the two women think over that particular piece of information.

“Children say all sorts of strange things,” the first woman says.

“Indeed,” agrees the second woman.

“But I think it really shows something isn't quite right with Cathy lately.”

“The poor dear.”

“The _poor_ dear.”

And then a third woman joins them and they are out the door, chattering about lunch. Mouse sits still, thinking.

When the church is nearly empty, she stands. She has a plan.

The face that greets Mouse at the door is older, softly lined and pretty. There's no sign of demonic possession, but, Mouse thinks, that's not unusual.

“Hello?” the woman who must be Cathy Jones says.

“Hi,” Mouse smiles. “I'm Maggie, I'm new here, and just wanted to say hi.”

She's being reckless; introducing yourself to neighbors is something she's only seen on television, most people preferring to keep to themselves. But if the woman in front of her really is possessed, Mouse wants to help.

And she wants to prove herself. No lies, especially from yourself, Marcus said.

“Oh,” Cathy says. Her smile is forced. “I'm Cathy. Lovely to meet you.” From her tone it's clear she thinks this should end the exchange and Mouse should very kindly please leave.

Mouse stays put, still smiling. The silence grows, until finally Cathy says, a bit desperately, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Oh, thank you so much,” Mouse replies. “I'm gasping.” She follows Cathy in.

She hadn't been sure that would work; was relying on the demon wanting to keep up the facade, that it didn't know it had been noticed, that Cathy would ask her in. So many chances for something to go wrong, and she's only just begun.

Mouse should probably be more nervous, after what happened the last time she'd come face to face with a demon. Instead, she finds herself angry. She knows what it is like to have a demon inside you, and Cathy is suffering because some evil thing had taken advantage. 

She comments vaguely on the house, more to keep Cathy and the thing inside her distracted than anything else. She asks whether Cathy has any children (two boys, all grown up and starting their own families) and asks after her husband (heart attack last May, God rest him, but he'd left her some money and she was managing fine). All on her own, having recently lost her husband, there must have been half a dozen ways for the demon to find a way in.

Mouse sips her tea, pauses, apologetically asks whether Cathy has any sugar, and when Cathy turns to get the sugar bowl off the counter, quickly pours holy water into her tea. When she finishes stirring in her sugar, Mouse makes sure to catch the spoon on the rim of the cup, spilling it all over the table and splashing onto Cathy.

The tea is lukewarm, but Cathy shrieks in pain anyway. There are several splotches of pink on her hands. If she wasn't possessed, the spilled liquid should just be an annoyance. Still, Mouse wants to be sure.

“I'm speaking to the being inside Mrs. Jones,” she says in Punjabi. She makes her tone apologetic, so she could be mistaken for simply being very upset. Just in case.

Cathy goes still, and smiles. It's a horrible thing, sly and slow, out of place on her pretty face. 

“What have we here?” the demon asks, and sniffs. “A baby exorcist? And all on her own. Why not? Should be more entertaining than this withered old thing.”

Mouse steps forward and jabs Cathy Jones with the illegal stun gun she'd bought for this very purpose.

The demon doesn't come to slowly. One minute Cathy's eyes are closed, the next they are open and blazing as she strains against the ropes Mouse tied her with.

“God, whose nature is ever merciful and forgiving,” Mouse begins.

The demon laughs, and then looks at her, eyes sharp and piercing.

“Oh,” it says. “It's _you_.” It laughs again.

“Accept our prayer that this servant of yours, bound by fetters of sin, may be pardoned by your loving kindness,” she continues.

“Yes, you certainly have plenty of sin, don't you,” the demon says. “Couldn't get enough the last time time? Missed the feeling of something inside you that bad?”

Mouse ignores it, shoving all the force of her belief into her words.

“Holy Lord, almighty Father, everlasting God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” she continues, and flicks more holy water on the demon. It hisses.

“You'll never see Him,” it cries. “You'll never be like your Marcus. His face will remain dark forever, because you are unworthy.”

“Maybe I'll never see Him,” replies Mouse, leaving off the litany for a moment. “But I can still send as many of you evil things back to where you came from. I can live with that.”

The exorcism takes two weeks. At the time, Mouse thinks it is one of the most difficult things she has done in her life. Later, she will think of it as the easiest exorcism she has ever conducted, righteous fury leaving no room for fear or doubt.

Mouse covers Cathy in her duvet, leaves a glass of water with some paracetamol by her bed, and quietly slips out. She drives away, out of the town, to an empty stretch of road, where she proceeds to break down.

She'd been so stupid. She could have been possessed again. She could have killed Cathy Jones. There were half a hundred things that could have gone wrong, and she'd ignored them all because she'd wanted to prove...what? That she could be an exorcist? That she wasn't as corrupt as she'd thought? She'd been stupid, and arrogant.

_But it had worked_. After she's finished berating herself, this is the thought that lingers: she had done it. She'd saved Cathy, and banished the demon. She can do this. Mouse knows she can't trust she will always have the same impenetrable shield of righteousness she'd worn the past two weeks, that there will be stronger demons, or more sleepless nights than she can cope with, but she can do this.

She just needs to get smarter.

There are more exorcists in the world than she'd thought, and not all of them are beholden to the Church. Some are easy to find, listed in the phone book and everything, while others she finds simply through being in the right place at the right time. Not all of them are real, but most of them, surprisingly, are.

She watches as a rabbi draws a demon's story from its own lips, and use that knowledge together with scripture to banish the demon. She talks with a hafiza about the most effective number of repetitions for different types of verse. She hears rumors of exorcists who claim not to believe in God but have successfully performed exorcisms nevertheless. She compares notes with other Catholic exorcists.

She doesn't meet Marcus, and she tries not to wonder whether she's grateful for this or not. She doesn't see God, either, or hear His voice, and she thinks she is coming to accept she might never. Still, that is no reason not to do the job. Every demon cast out is the world cleansed of just that bit more evil. She might not see God, but that doesn't mean she isn't doing His work.

There is power in repetition: practice makes perfect. Mouse performs more exorcisms. She isn't always successful; she isn't Marcus, after all. But she's good, and she's getting better.

Her life changes again as she leaves confession.

“Do people really call you Mouse?” asks a small, slight man. A priest, but not one Mouse has seen before.

“It's my name,” she replies, not stopping.

“Not your Christian name,” says the priest. He keeps pace with her. “That would be Ma-”

“Please, just tell me what you're here for so we can both get on with our days,” Mouse snaps, turning to face him. He nods, and draws himself up.

“I am Father Giuseppe, from the Office of Exorcisms. I am here to bring you back into the fold.”

“I never left,” replies Mouse. She feels bitterness rise in her. “I assumed you didn't want me, that it wasn't my place, but I never left.”

Father Giuseppe looks startled at that.

“You didn't take your vows,” he says, frowning.

“I left the abbey, but I never left the Church. I mean, you met me here,” she gestures at the altar, the stained glass, the confession booths. “And if you're from the Office of Exorcisms, how did you think I've been expelling demons all these years? _Faith_.”

Mouse has never raised her voice in church, she was raised better than that, but her whispering is loud and angry and it's almost worse than if she did raise her voice. Father Giuseppe looks upset.

“I suppose you're right,” he sighs. “But the offer still stands, if you're interested. Become an official exorcist, with the Church's blessing, receive the tools and money you require, and receive your assignments from the Office, instead of having to keep your ear to the ground. I don't imagine the freelance exorcist life is a comfortable one.”

It isn't, and his offer is tempting. It would be easier, and it would salve something inside her to know the Church still wants her, after everything.

“If I say no, would you just leave and go back to the Vatican,” she asks, testing. Father Giuseppe smiles, half embarrassed. 

“Ah, well, I have been sent to bring you back, so if you refuse, I would have to ask again. And possibly several more times.” He spreads his hands. “Orders, you know.”

Mouse sighs, and tries not to let the warmth blooming in her chest show on her face.

“Well then, why not?”


End file.
